It's all over but the shouting, when it comes to the highly-publicized, man vs. machine contest on Jeopardy! But a debate has surfaced over whether IBM's Watson supercomputer had a built-in advantage in the event, when it came to buzzing-in answers to clues.
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If nobody's perfect, same goes for computers. Big Blue's digital dynamo Watson may have handily defeated its human rivals this week on the Jeopardy! challenge, but it made some major errors along the way. IBM's engineers have been posting post-mortems about that on the Internet.
For Watson, it was elementary. IBM's mighty supercomputer has landed the title of new Jeopardy! champ. No matter how hard Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings -- the two human contestants pitted against the machine -- tried, they were just no match for the brainy Watson.
IBM's supercomputer Watson racked up $5,000 in winnings on day one of the three-day Jeopardy! challenge Monday, but so did one of its human competitors. The human champs, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, face long odds -- at least according those betting their own money on the action.
Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter know how tough IBM's Watson supercomputer will be to defeat when they compete heads-to-chips next week. With the honor of the human race at stake, here's a look at the strategies they're counting on to outwit the ultra-brainy black box.
Brandishing hardware and software optimized for understanding the nuances of natural-language questions, Big Blue's ultra-brainy machine is preparing to face two flesh-and-blood champions of the TV game show. And if it also brings in some new customers for IBM's growing analytics software business, all the better.